Over the past several years, politicians like Justin Trudeau and Kathleen Wynne passed laws demanding that biological men identifying as women be accepted as women by Canadian society at large, no matter what the cost. Many warned that the implementation of the transgender ideology would have unforeseen consequences, but these warnings were ignored. Now, the chickens are coming home to roost. From the National Post:

A woman has filed a human rights complaint against a Toronto shelter for female recovering addicts, claiming staff forced her to share a small double room with a pre-operative male-to-female transgender person. The formal complaint against the Jean Tweed Centre, which runs Palmerston House, followed Kristi Hanna’s efforts to inquire about her own legal rights in this unusual situation, only to be told by Ontario’s Human Rights Legal Support Centre that, by describing her new roommate as a “man,” Hanna was the one engaged in illegal discrimination.

Just to be clear here: A “pre-operative male-to-female transgender person” is a male with a penis, and in this case, it was a male with facial hair, chest hair, and combat boots. Because Hanna is not insane and correctly identified this person as a male, she was accused of “illegal discrimination”—because the Trudeau government and the Wynne government have decreed that Canadians, by law, must play along with these games of dangerous make-believe.

Hanna, 37, is a former paramedic who has lately worked in the service industry, and has been struggling with the lingering effects of sexual abuse and resulting problems with addiction to alcohol and cocaine. She described herself as an “active ally in the LGBTQ community,” but said this conflict has left her feeling as if vulnerable women are unable to voice their own gender-based rights for fear of violating someone else’s.

“It’s affecting everyone in the house. This can completely ruin your recovery, let alone your safety, let alone your life,” Hanna said in an interview. She spent two nights sharing the room — constantly looking over to make sure her roommate was still in bed, she said — before taking an indefinite leave from the shelter. Hanna had lived for seven months at the central Toronto facility, located in an old Victorian house, but since last week has been staying with friends on couches, as a “transient,” she said. “Those two nights were hell for me.”

There are a couple of important points to note here. First of all, Hanna is not a social conservative. She considers herself an “active ally in the LGBTQ community.” Like so many others who are butting up against the transgender ideologues, she has discovered that being in favor of gay marriage, and accepting of nearly all of the current manifestations of the Sexual Revolution are not enough—she must also believe that biological males should be permitted into exclusively female spaces based only the say-so of these biological males. And because ideology trumps both biology and sanity, sexual abuse victims like Hanna must suffer as their safe spaces are eliminated. More:

In her formal complaint to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, Hanna alleges the shelter “admitted a male bodied transgender into the safety of my home, bedroom and safe spaces.” She claims this has caused her stress, anxiety, rape flashbacks, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and sleep deprivation.

“We were all choked by our own anxiety, our crippling PTSD symptoms. You could cut the tension in the house,” she said. She described other women having rape flashbacks, threatening suicide, and one requiring hospitalization…

The dispute began in mid-July, when the transgender woman arrived and, according to Hanna, was acting odd and failed a sobriety test. Residents must be clean for a month before they are admitted. After some time in detox, the trans woman was admitted July 20 and assigned to Hanna’s bedroom, a double room with beds about five feet apart.

Hanna said the woman is in her late 20s, has facial hair, chest hair, and wears large black combat boots that “trigger” her with their thumping. She said at one communal dinner, the roommate talked about having had a wife in the past, and a pregnant fiancée, and was overheard talking about some unidentified women as “hot” and expressing her preference for Latina women. Hanna said her mannerisms came across as “piggish” and inappropriate. The Post was unable to contact the trans woman on Thursday.

It turns out that this “trans woman” must be a lesbian, because he obviously still has a strong preference for women. But again, that doesn’t matter anymore: The right of a biological male with a penis and beard who claims he is a female but still has sex with females is now a pre-operational transgender female lesbian, and the rape victims had better get woke and deal with it. It is also important to note here that the National Post, too, has to tow the line: You’ll notice that they consistently refer to this biological male by female pronouns. After all, it is the law.

Hanna said she told staff this person made her feel vulnerable and scared, a view she shared with other residents, some of whom signed a petition to staff.

“All of us were completely upset and flabbergasted, pretty much, and instantly all full of fear. They won’t even allow a man on the property without permission by the staff and all the residents. And we had no pre-warning of any of this. There was never any discussions. It was never mentioned. We were all just blindsided,” Hanna said. “Everyone in the house has had at some point male-enforced trauma. This is not about discrimination, this is about the safety of male-enforced trauma victims.”

She said shelter staff told her: “We’re all about inclusion and it’s unfortunate that you feel this way… Deal with it or leave.” She was offered the alternative of moving to a room that, because it leads to a fire escape, does not even have a door that closes. She declined. With the help of a family friend, she inquired about her own rights with the Human Rights Legal Support Centre, which provides guidance to potential human rights complainants.

Her friend, Peta Nankivell, described Hanna as “brash,” and said that in the phone call she was angry and under stress, and used male pronouns to emphasize her objections. That led the advisor to end the call, concerned that it was in fact Hanna who was violating human rights law by her words and behaviour — which could lead the roommate to file a complaint of her own, putting the Centre in a conflict of interest.

“What you’ve told me is potentially discriminatory and potentially a violation of the law, and that individual may file against you in the future, and our role is to keep those conflicts of interest in mind,” the advisor said. No one from the Centre was available to comment Thursday.

It bears pointing out that everyone who has been warning about the implementation of the transgender ideology has been warning that things like this would happen. Jordan B. Peterson. Barbara Kay. I wrote an article recently noting that a man claiming to be transgender got himself sent to a women’s prison in the UK, and promptly sexually assaulted several women. These incidents are predictable and have been predicted, but again, our progressive leaders—men like Justin Trudeau—rammed these ideologies down the throats of the Canadian people, and it is rape victims and those who genuinely need safe spaces who will suffer. More:

Renu Mandhane, Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, said that as a general rule, women’s shelters have the right to restrict their accommodation to women.

“A trans person should have access to the shelter that matches their lived gender identity,” she said in a statement to the Post. “However, this does not necessarily require that a cis and trans woman share the same bedroom. An appropriate balancing of the rights of both women may require that one of the women be provided with non-shared accommodation.”

One objection here: This fellow with a beard, chest hair, a penis, and combat boots has no idea with a woman’s “lived gender identity” is like, and to say that he does is to render the word “woman” meaningless. Has he ever had menstrual cramps? A pregnancy or pregnancy scares? Any other experience that comes with the physical reality of being a woman? No. Of course not. Perhaps the most female thing this guy has done is ended up in a women’s shelter, where he bragged about his taste in Latina women and complained about his ex-wife—with the staff of the shelter defending him every step of the way. The “lived experiences” of rape victims, on the other hand, are apparently of no consequence in comparison to those of transgender people.

The Ontario Human Rights Code says everyone has a right to equal treatment with respect to services and occupation of accommodation without discrimination because of various grounds, including gender identity and expression. It also says everyone who occupies accommodation has a right to freedom from harassment by other occupants because of the same grounds.

“Gender identity and expression.” Canadians were warned that that phrase would result in men posing as women being permitted access to female spaces, and that when it happened there would be nothing we could do. We are no longer permitted to say what our own eyes tell us, and common sense has been banned. Hanna, unfortunately, is simply one more victim of an ideology that will claim many more in the future.

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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.

1 Comment

This story is all too typical of what ails our public policy vision or the lack thereof. There is a blanket refusal to acknowledge objective differences between men and women. These absolutely involve differences in size and strength which require that women have safe spaces that exclude biological males in certain cases i.e. when they are in a state of undress in a changing room, locker room, bedroom, or hospital room, although men and women are now forced to share hospital rooms which in addition to putting the safety of women at risk violates the dignity of both sexes and their gender-based need for privacy from members of the opposite sex who aren’t their intimate partners or family members. All so-called transgender women are male-bodied whether they have transitioned or not. They don’t lose their size or strength post-op. Moreover, some transgender women are heterosexual and desire biological women as sexual partners, not men or other trans women. By some estimates, hetero-transgender persons are about 20% of the trans population. The issue doesn’t turn exclusively on the size/strength of transgender women compared to biological women or their sexual orientation. Trans-women may resent bio-women for obvious reasons (genetic females don’t have to ‘work at it’) and this may in and of itself be a setup to conflicts posing heightened risks for natural women. It is just crazy that in the same province where men and women are being denied the most basic rights to their own gender expression – no more “father” or “mother” on the birth certificate of their own children – that someone would be challenged for referring to a pre-op trans person using anatomically correct gender pronouns rather than nonwords that aren’t in the dictionary.